That transforms what seems like an exercise in humility into an opportunity to educate and engage customers and prospects. By raising the potential downfalls of its product itself HubSpot educates and engages current and prospective customers. The rest thanked HubSpot for raising these problems and/or asked for help in solving them. Which they are. The implied solution?

PR firms already have deep relationships with clients, and understand – and in some cases helped create – their branding messages. They’re also skilled at creating content for different audiences, either using their own employees or outside help. They show that the use of marketing automation software is indeed taking off, but not as quickly as some had hoped. Except I just did.

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RECENT POSTS

FEBRUARY 27, 2011
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WHAT WORKS - WHAT DOESN'T[Help, Prospect] Why Marketing Automation is Floundering (Amen!)

FEBRUARY 5, 2011
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WHAT WORKS - WHAT DOESN'T[Help, Prospect] How We Can Help

JANUARY 7, 2011
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WHAT WORKS - WHAT DOESN'T[Help, Prospect] How Quality Content Is Helping IT Vendors

JANUARY 7, 2011
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WHAT WORKS - WHAT DOESN'T[Help, Prospect] eBook: Content Marketing: Where To Place Your Bets

JANUARY 7, 2011
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WHAT WORKS - WHAT DOESN'T[Help, Prospect] What Is Content Marketing?

OCTOBER 19, 2010
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WHAT WORKS - WHAT DOESN'T[Help, Prospect] Software Consultancy: Why MA Is Hot

But is asking prospects to spend the time playing an online game good for all parts of the sales cycle? In Innov8 players are presented with multiple scenarios (tweaking a supply chain or improving customer service) and get to see how business process automation helps the business. OK, World of Warcraft it ain’t. Maybe.

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WHAT WORKS - WHAT DOESN'T

OCTOBER 19, 2010

[Help, Prospect] Software Consultancy: Why MA Is Hot

Market analyst Lauren Carlson also had an interesting recent post about the major trends pushing customers towards marketing automation software , which tracks prospect behavior to determine which products they’re most likely to consider. Among the main drivers she listed: Buyers’ desire for quality content; an aversion to sales calls (especially before prospects are ready for one), the need for marketing to prove its value to the business and the fact that sales cycles are longer in a down economy. And if there are hurdles I missed, I'd love to hear about them.

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WHAT WORKS - WHAT DOESN'T

AUGUST 10, 2010

[Help, Prospect] Virtual Trade Shows for Mere Mortals

SAP talking at them,) but tracked which content prospects viewed to learn about their needs, and will use a content management system to target future info and offers to them based on those actions. Chief Marketing Officer Marty Homlish says that being able to see who viewed what information, and for how long, goes a long way towards helping SAP “capture demand.”. First, get the customers talking to each other and stay out of the way, unless you can really help. I recently Not only did it focus on getting customers to talk to each other, (VS. And that costs.

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WHAT WORKS - WHAT DOESN'T

JUNE 14, 2010

[Help, Prospect] Looking for Good Content? Go for Brains, Not Titles

These consultants help very large customers with very complex needs install very large, complicated software. But you draw prospects through content marketing by the quality of your content, not the titles of the talking heads. Journalism isn’t like marketing, and that isn’t just because journalists supposedly seek the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Reporters and editors take an extremely pragmatic, “whatever and whoever it takes” approach to getting good stories. That means choosing and quoting good sources based on their knowledge and credibility.

Vendor use of jargon and their lack of simplifying issue complexity often keep business-oriented buyers from grasping the nuances of how technology can help to solve their problem,” says a post on the Marketing Interactions blog. Explaining things clearly to your prospects isn’t rocket science. That sounds like a series of FAQs (frequently-asked questions) aimed at prospects with different pain points, budgets, buying authority and/or existing infrastructures. But doing so won’t help unless you scrub the jargon from the answers to those FAQs. report.
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Another is s aying the same thing six ways, as in “Reducing inefficiency and boosting productivity helps to reduce costs and enhance corporate productivity by making better use of corporate resources.” What you don’t want to do is give the prospect an excuse to walk away shaking their head at how clueless you are. OK, maybe some people are so dumb they don’t know a heater gets hot. But they’re not who’s seeing your marketing content if you’re selling a big-ticket IT product or service. What’s the B2B equivalent of “heater gets hot?”.
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Trying to Get the Big Mo A recent post by Jeff Pedowitz argues that marketing automation vendors – selling tools that automatically send and track responses to marketing material to target prospects – are floundering, or at least not growing as quickly as they should. But the rest of us need some help crawling before we can walk, much less run. As someone trying to grow his own use of these tools, all of these shortcomings sound correct. But the two that strike closest to home are lack of customer education and making the whole process too complicated. Is it inbound marketing?
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Content marketing means using anything from spec sheets to white papers to case studies, Webinars or podcasts to keep prospects interested. Sure, What’s new is that the content is distributed over the Internet, and we can track which prospects downloaded or clicked through to which content. That readership history helps identify where each prospect is in the purchase cycle, what follow-on information or offers we should send them, and who are the most attractive prospects.
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With even CIOs doing much of their product research on-line, how can you as a marketeer cut through the clutter with quality content that keeps prospects engaged? To help you create the highest-quality content as quickly as possible, I wrote “Content Marketing: Where to Place Your Quality Bets. Click Image To Download. IT customers today are overwhelmed with promotional information – emails, newsletters, Tweets, blogs, Webinars, podcasts, YouTube, Slideshare and even Facebook updates. world. Don’t keep throwing money at content creation without a plan.
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